Thursday, August 7, 2008

Downtown Eastside residents have been known to call it Harmaggedon. Conservative Health Minister Tony Clement calls it, "harm addition." Downtown Eastside residents and Tony Clement are no longer parroting the term "harm reduction" used by activists such as Mark Townsend and his spouse Liz Evans, who for years have paid their mortgage pushing projects for addicts on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

At the World Health Organization's 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City this week to promote a WHO guide on fighting HIV and AIDS, Clement made UN povertarians squirm when he told reporters,"Allowing and/or encouraging people to inject heroin into their veins is not harm reduction, it is the opposite ... We believe it is a form of harm addition."

These activists are never satisfied, Clement pointed out. "There are already people saying injection sites aren't enough, that true harm reduction is giving out heroin for free," the minister said. He could have also mentioned that activists are even calling for a safe crack cocaine smoking room inside the supervised injection site on the Downtown Eastside. "You have to draw the line somewhere....", he said.